Global warming and wars heated the earth. When an attempt was made to cool it down, the planet froze. Wilford Industries built a train to look for newer ways to scout the planet in search of food and energy sources.
Fans and lockdown binge-watchers can guess that we are talking about Snowpiercer, a new Hollywood series on Netflix. The series is named after a train, Snowpiercer, that is circling the globe and carries the last remaining humans. The gigantic, perpetually moving train is and saviour of humanity and central to the series .
To celebrate the launch of Snowpiercer, TNT opened a competition for the designers of the world to “Design your own, original and visually inspiring train car”. The participants had to choose one of the three train car templates provided by TNT as a starting point, but explicitly asked them to let their imagination run wild. Thousands of entries from all over the world poured in. From these, five designs were selected. One of the winning designs, Drone Hanger, is created by Indian product designer, Neil Foley.
“In the series, as the days move into the future, the Wilford Industries’ train would have to look for newer ways to scout around the planet in search of food and energy sources. I proposed a manned/unmanned drone hanger,” says Neil. The Drone Hanger has retractable glass roof doors for three manned and unmanned aircrafts to launch themselves out of the moving train. These launch pads can also be designed to be partitioned to create individual launch zones. Under the mid pad one has the drone maintenance unit.
Neil is the founder and creative director of Neil Foley Designs, and has won dozens of awards in several international design competitions. “As a designer I like to continuously benchmark my design skills to keep abreast with today’s ever changing social and tech world. So, I scout the world wide web for challenges where I could challenge myself by participating in these design competitions,” he says. Those who have watched Snowpiercer can imagine one of the 1000+ train cars to be a drone hanger unit as designed by Neil.
For designing Drone Hanger, Neil immersed himself in the series, and understood the plot, characters and technology. “Post that I always start the brainstorming of ideas using a pen and a clean sheet. Doodling idea after idea. Once I have evaluated that a certain idea has potential, I start to refine them and detail them out to its final avatar,” says Neil. The overall design time for a project was around 25 to 30 days.
Neil’s Drone Hanger will be featured across Snowpiercer’s social and marketing channels.
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